It is always a good idea to clean up your Eloqua Contact database on a consistent basis. Over time, many Contact records get created, and not all Contacts are created equally. Since we pay Oracle based on the number of existing Contacts, keeping your Contact list clean is a good financial strategy.

However, there are many other reasons to delete contacts. Here are a few:

The Law! New privacy regulations like GDPR are requiring companies to obtain consent before even processing (read “store”) data. If you don’t have consent in one form or another, you might be required by law to delete contact information.

Hard Bouncebacks Waste Space: Once a Contact record has been flagged as a hard bounceback, there is very little reason to keep that Contact in your database – it takes up room, increases reporting needs and is of no use for ongoing marketing needs.

Deliverability Score: If you’re sending to long-inactive contacts, you’re likely to get caught in SPAM traps, and get flagged as SPAM, resulting in a lower deliverability score, and in ALL of your emails being less likely to reach their destination!

Faster Processing, Better Metrics: If you have a large contact list that has had little activity over a long period of time, you might want to clear out old and inactive Contacts. This will speed up processing times, improve your metrics (since you won’t be sending email to contacts that are not interested) and provide you and your management team with a better view into your pipeline.

How to Delete Contacts in Eloqua:

There are two way you can keep your database clean: either by deleting your contacts manually, or by implementing an automated process. The manual approach requires continuous effort and monitoring, and of course, there will always be the chance of human error. You can find the steps for this manual approach in Topliners – there are several entries that talk about filters, and segments and exporting and importing – well, you get the idea – it is not a simple straightforward activity.

4Thought Marketing has built a Contact Deleter with Archive cloud app which does all of this for you in an automated program – set it up once, let it run and your database will stay clean, neat and orderly. This app gives you the upper hand to delete any part of your Contact list based on criteria that you define. You can have different instances of the app running to deal with different groups of Contacts you wish to delete. And, this app not only deletes the Contacts, it also creates an archival backup on your SFTP server. But even though you have an archived backup, a word of warning: Be careful when you use it – test it before turning it loose – or you might delete contacts you want to keep.

What About Related Custom Objects?

If you have a complex system, you may have custom objects linked to your contacts. Obviously if the contacts are worth deleting, it’s probable that the related Custom Objects should be deleted also! Don’t worry… 4Thought Marketing has several apps that do this, and are otherwise related to deleting COs. We’ve listed them at the end of the article for you.

Why Archive – If anything goes wrong or if in the future you need the data for any exceptional or unforeseen situations, it’s always good to have backup – and this just does it automatically.

Get started: It’s easy and cost effective to get started with the 4Thought Marketing Contact Deleter with Archive. You can simply go to the Oracle app cloud and search for Contact Deleter . It is easy to install, and very powerful in its functionality.